What qualifications does Frink have for being President?
Being Frink.
… I never really thought about it that way before … it’s all so clear to be now … must make campaign contribution …
The reason lack of political experience is only a giant red flag and not a disqualification is delegation. The President does not need to know how to do everything – they only need to be smart enough to know who knows how to do things, and delegate accordingly. I’d be fine with an amateur pitching in the Word Series if they could delegate the pitching duties to someone else, as long as I trusted their judgment about who that person might be.
That said, it’s still a giant red flag. I’m not excited about the prospect.
I’m just curious, other than not being Trump, what qualifications does Oprah have for being President?
Well, when Trump ran for President, he would have been the least qualified person to ever be elected to that office.
If Oprah runs for President, she would be tied for the least qualified person to ever be elected to that office.
Totally different 😉
But all snark aside, lack of political experience is not an immediate disqualification, just a giant red flag. Oprah is clearly a successful businesswoman, which puts her above Trump on that scale, for whatever that’s worth. She doesn’t appear to be mobbed up, which is nice. She also can go hours and even days without lying or committing a major crime, which again is a serious leg up.
Maybe she’s got some political savvy that we haven’t seen very clearly yet. Trump’s political liabilities were on full display and easy to discern during the primary and general election, and people ran from him in droves (not enough, but still). Obviously Oprah will come across more favorably than Trump, but she’ll be up against people like Kamala Harris who will be very clearly smart, levelheaded, professional and experienced. Don’t forget Trump was up against a clown car full of amateurs in the primary, so it didn’t really matter what sort of fool he looked like there, and he failed to be more appealing than his opponent in the general. Oprah will have to really prove herself to come out on top, just in the primary alone.
With Trump in office, I keep hoping liberals will see the danger of consolidation and expansion of federal power. Some wonder if marijuana could be the gateway drug to federalism.
If Federalism’s most notable appeal is that it can throw a wrench in the gears when the Federal Government opts to do spectacularly bad things, the argument is already lost IMO. Because, among other things, who can throw a wrench into the gears when states opt to do spectacularly bad things? Whoever gets primacy gets the ability to screw people over, any good anarchist could tell you that.
That said, liberals AFAIK have never been against Federalism per se, but see the role of the Federal goverment fundamentally differently than conservatives. There’s plenty of good stuff in Federalism, liberals just hate most of the things conservatives love about it, and vice-versa.
The NeverTrumpers (well, the ones that weren’t just kidding about it) are a fascinating bunch. Sure, you’ve got your David Brooks crowd who deals with it by digging even deeper into their own bullshit (i.e. “My party never had a problem with racism and was full of very serious policy ideas until Trump came along!”). But you do have a few who are starting to take a long and sober look (warning: crazy right-wing link with only hints of the beginnings of introspection) at how their party got to where they are today. Maybe the National Review is doing this. Maybe we’ll end up a better nation for it. I’m dubious, but you never know.
I’d rather put two tiny little things in my ears than two giant things over my ears with a big strap connecting them.
Commander Chekov would like a word.
I don’t use headphones.
My co-workers appreciate that I do, I can assure you.
I can still tell it’s “Hot Rocks Polka” on repeat from three cubicles away. Get some closed headphones please!
The collusion starts paying off.
EDIT: Hey, that may be the only time I’ve ever linked to the National Review, so get your ideologically conservative news served up by CatBus while the limited-time offer stands.
Speaking of the conservative news slant – twice within the period of one year I have linked to the National Review now.
Could the National Review be heading in the direction of “self-defined conservative news outlet with actual editorial standards and some degree of credibility” to join the Wall Street Journal in that lonely group? A few more fact-based analyses and I might have to check with them more often. It’s a crazy world we live in where the National Review of all places changes their opinions to fit the facts rather than the other way around.
Well, my $80 set is pretty unfashionable*. But it goes well with my overall very unfashionable wardrobe. And as with all audio stuff, there is a point of diminishing returns on audio (more money can yield incrementally better results, but is it worth it?)–but some people are willing to go further beyond that point than others. $300 for good headphones is still an excellent deal over an equivalent-sounding speaker setup, though.
* And it should be noted I’ve been called a cheapskate by quite a lot of people.
At $330, they better have good sound. The headphones I usually use are less than $20.
At the risk of threadcrapping…this. I don’t get you fancy headphone people.
If it helps: in part, it’s because getting incredible sound from speakers is really effing hard. Speakers are (relatively) expensive, they are large, room acoustics are never ideal without major investment (build a media room!), external noises are hard to block out. So instead of all that, you blow $80 on a set of headphones and have the audio equivalent of a multi-thousand-dollar speaker setup, and you can take them on vacation with you!
So it’s the fancy speaker people I really don’t get. I’ve spent more on a day at the amusement park than I have on headphones, but speakers, sheesh, there’s a money pit with no bottom, because the speakers are just the cheapest component of the whole picture, and in the end you can’t even take it with you.
So apparently Wikileaks has “leaked” a complete copy of Fire and Fury. I’m pretty sure that’s the only book they’ve ever released online. They’re not circumventing censorship, not releasing classified info or trade secrets. It’s as if their only goal was to dampen sales of an already bestselling and widely-available book. Who’d have thought?
At least they probably have learned by now not to release a version that’s been altered by Russian intelligence agents, like they did with Macron’s e-mails.
Typical to my biases, if you’re in the market for something completely unfashionable, cheap, but very good and damn near indestructible, I’d recommend the Sony MDR-V6. It’s truly the same damn thing as the MDR-7506, minus the gold stereo plug. Response is pretty flat (in a good way), detail is great, I use them for all my audio editing.
Oh, and anything can drive them, from some cheap knockoff MP3 player on up. And there’s a good chance the guy who mixed the audio you’re listening to did it using these headphones (well, the 7506).
The SE dialogue changes were already changed in our version… but those changes may not have been so great either.
But that is how it ends up working, intended or not. The media spending so much time critiquing tweets means less time critiquing policies. And the critiques of the tweets can be very easily dismissed as fluff. Leaving very little observable media criticism of Trump for those who dismiss that stuff out of hand.
It’s also how it worked during the campaign. Nobody knew a single one of his policies, and 46% of the country thought that was a wonderful thing.
You didn’t mention you can finally say “Merry Christmas” again 😉
Or is it that you can finally dream of a White Christmas?
or there is CNN and MSNBC
I hear this from a lot of conservatives. Do you really think there’s an anti-Trump bias here, or is this just a counterpoint to the left of FOX? All the standard leftist media boogeymen (CNN, MSNBC, NPR, NYT) seem pretty pro-Trump to me so far, just pro-Trump by omission rather than pro-Trump by commission like FOX. That’s the view from the left at least.
Just a quick look at CNN.com has several headlines that are embarrassing for Trump. Usually, I see far more. It’s often a mixture of news and opinion articles that are disparaging towards him. I’ll be honest, a part of me enjoys it and fills me with a proud “I told ya so” attitude towards the Republican Party of which I am a former member. On the other hand, I can’t help but feel like it’s excessive to the point that I find some of it hard to believe–like such extreme saturation of negative Trump news that it’s hard to know what’s really true and what is actually just people trying desperately to bring him down.
For the record, I still hope he does get brought down. I feel he is tremendously dangerous to our country and the world.
I dunno. The “news” (such as it is) today involves people having Twitter feuds and publishing tell-all books. As that goes, the CNN front page I’m looking at seems to cover those bases pretty neutrally, albeit with the salacious tabloid fever that flavors all news these days.
Now, I’m with you that the facts are anti-Trump. So if you report the facts objectively, you’re going to sound anti-Trump. But you’d have to pretty much ignore his tweets and random blatherings and focus on policies, and I’m afraid no media outlet’s going to do that in the clickbait economy.
I guess we may also be measuring bias differently too. If you’re upset the media hops over the latest Twitter gaffe at the expense of everything else, I’m with you. And Trump’s manner of Twitter usage pretty much ensures that that salacious gossip column style coverage is going to be anti-Trump because you’d have to be a crazy person (or FOX contributor) to support his tweets.
But as far as the real substantial news goes, I see CNN doing a lot of “our staff stenographer just wrote down what they said at the press conference without analysis”, which is pretty pro-Trump (also lazy). Or consulting “experts on both sides” which allows people to offer exercises in framing the issues rather than analysis of the issues (also lazy). And as the facts are anti-Trump, dropping any number of substantial stories skews the coverage in his favor.
So is media shallow? Hell yes. Lazy? Vapid? No argument. Liberal? Not so much.
I like that the responses focused solely on his examples of media.
Well, there’s not much to argue with in the basic premise. Objectivity doesn’t sell. Centrism isn’t the same thing as objectivity, but I feel like the Washington Post has been doing pretty well walking the line there (for now). Objectivity? Nope, haven’t seen in in very big quantities anywhere.
or there is CNN and MSNBC
I hear this from a lot of conservatives. Do you really think there’s an anti-Trump bias here, or is this just a counterpoint to the left of FOX? All the standard leftist media boogeymen (CNN, MSNBC, NPR, NYT) seem pretty pro-Trump to me so far, just pro-Trump by omission rather than pro-Trump by commission like FOX. That’s the view from the left at least.
So historical! Monument honoring black Confederate soldiers
Probably based on that photographic misattribution the Confederate apologists are still trotting out, as if historians haven’t already thoroughly documented its true origins. Oh well. The rewriting of history continues.
Bond films are under “J” for James Bond
I twitched, I’ll admit it.
I’m not happy with it either, but I can’t find an alternative I like. Putting them at the beginning for “007” feels aesthetically off and “B” for Bond isn’t really any different than J.
That doesn’t make sense to me. If someone comes up to me and says they love James movies, I have no idea what they’re talking about.
So if you have Forrest Gump, you put it at ‘G’ for Gump, Forrest?
If the name of the film was James Bond, I’d file it under “J” too (if I filed alphabetically). Similarly, if they were all “James Bond and the…” a la Harry Potter. But it’s the name of a central character in a series of films that don’t have that character’s name in the film titles, so it’s lastname, firstname. Forrest Gump goes under “F”.
This goes back to my record store days. Jethro Tull and Bob Dylan are both fictional names. But Jethro Tull goes under “J” and Bob Dylan goes under “D” because Bob Dylan is a pseudonym for a particular person, whereas Jethro Tull is a name for the entire band.
You’re overthinking it. Like, a lot.
Sorry, I was paid for doing this some time ago. Not, you know, a lot… but paid nonetheless. The OCD sticks.
We were open til midnight. Some guy came in and spent a lot of time by our cassettes. We didn’t take much notice because cassettes were this weird pre-CD holdover without the hipster cred of the vinyl, off in a corner. By the time we went to check on him, we discovered that he had reorganized our cassette section by the color of the spine.
Oh yeah, and Courtney Love came in one time. That was awkward.
If I had enough movies and time, I’d rearrange my collection to make a gradient, take a picture, and then put it all back.
It was very pretty, and well-executed.
We had strong reason to believe drugs were involved, needless to say.
So how long did it take to put it all back?
It was a pretty small section. Maybe an hour or two, including the time spent just standing back and laughing about it.
PM sent. Please let me know if you see any problems with the Icelandic subtitles. They’re based on OCR’s of the official Blu-ray subtitles, but OCR can introduce errors, and the original translations may have had trouble too.
Apologies for the link to the poster child for crap website design gone haywire:
http://www.liberalamerica.org/2018/01/03/chrissy-teigen-john-legend-push-back-trumpkin-slander/
For those afraid to follow the link, those Pizzagate peddlers are still out there and still telling people there are liberal pedophiles running amok in pizza parlors (or whatever the hell, do the specifics even matter?). Probably right after complaining about how Roy Moore was robbed by vote-stealing liberals, but I digress. We’ve even had links to some of these nutjobs in this thread, though thankfully not for a long time.
Anyway, the problem with stopping slander like this in America is that lawsuits are expensive, slow, and unlikely to yield any sort of consequential damages. But if you piss off the right people, they will throw all that aside and sue your ass anyway just to watch you burn. Hooray for Chrissy and John. Sometimes the spite move is the right move.
My findings on what makes a good subtitling font, posted mostly so that Google’s search results have a chance of turning up something more useful on the subject:
Other considerations are:
So anyway, that’s my brain dump, with for me the additional requirement that the font needs to be consistent between scripts in many, many languages, and that landed me on Noto Sans. Also, I’m the guy who kept using Arial for something like five years, so don’t take my word as gospel for any of this. There are lots of things I still don’t know about design and typefaces – I just feel a little less ignorant than I was a few months ago and wanted to share my findings.
Were there compromises? Absolutely. Noto’s capital “J” drops low, which is a little idiosyncratic for my taste. The italic forms of both the lowercase “A” and lowercase “F” seem less than ideal, but might grow on me. I had to go with a calligraphic style for Arabic and Thai, just because those languages traditionally don’t use sans serif for subtitles. And I had to devise a fairly complicated font fallback logic so that we wouldn’t see these lovely inconsistencies in Noto*. But, by and large, after some time and effort, it works really well. Certainly better than what we’re currently using IMO.
* I should add that Google is very much aware of these inconsistencies and provides guidelines for how to use Noto on their website which effectively resolves the issue. The problem is that these guidelines are geared toward CSS/web solutions, and I needed to script the fallback logic for Pango markup.
Bond films are under “J” for James Bond
I twitched, I’ll admit it.
I’m not happy with it either, but I can’t find an alternative I like. Putting them at the beginning for “007” feels aesthetically off and “B” for Bond isn’t really any different than J.
That doesn’t make sense to me. If someone comes up to me and says they love James movies, I have no idea what they’re talking about.
So if you have Forrest Gump, you put it at ‘G’ for Gump, Forrest?
If the name of the film was James Bond, I’d file it under “J” too (if I filed alphabetically). Similarly, if they were all “James Bond and the…” a la Harry Potter. But it’s the name of a central character in a series of films that don’t have that character’s name in the film titles, so it’s lastname, firstname. Forrest Gump goes under “F”.
This goes back to my record store days. Jethro Tull and Bob Dylan are both fictional names. But Jethro Tull goes under “J” and Bob Dylan goes under “D” because Bob Dylan is a pseudonym for a particular person, whereas Jethro Tull is a name for the entire band.
You’re overthinking it. Like, a lot.
Sorry, I was paid for doing this some time ago. Not, you know, a lot… but paid nonetheless. The OCD sticks.
We were open til midnight. Some guy came in and spent a lot of time by our cassettes. We didn’t take much notice because cassettes were this weird pre-CD holdover without the hipster cred of the vinyl, off in a corner. By the time we went to check on him, we discovered that he had reorganized our cassette section by the color of the spine.
Oh yeah, and Courtney Love came in one time. That was awkward.
If I had enough movies and time, I’d rearrange my collection to make a gradient, take a picture, and then put it all back.
It was very pretty, and well-executed.
We had strong reason to believe drugs were involved, needless to say.
Bond films are under “J” for James Bond
I twitched, I’ll admit it.
I’m not happy with it either, but I can’t find an alternative I like. Putting them at the beginning for “007” feels aesthetically off and “B” for Bond isn’t really any different than J.
That doesn’t make sense to me. If someone comes up to me and says they love James movies, I have no idea what they’re talking about.
So if you have Forrest Gump, you put it at ‘G’ for Gump, Forrest?
If the name of the film was James Bond, I’d file it under “J” too (if I filed alphabetically). Similarly, if they were all “James Bond and the…” a la Harry Potter. But it’s the name of a central character in a series of films that don’t have that character’s name in the film titles, so it’s lastname, firstname. Forrest Gump goes under “F”.
This goes back to my record store days. Jethro Tull and Bob Dylan are both fictional names. But Jethro Tull goes under “J” and Bob Dylan goes under “D” because Bob Dylan is a pseudonym for a particular person, whereas Jethro Tull is a name for the entire band.
You’re overthinking it. Like, a lot.
Sorry, I was paid for doing this some time ago. Not, you know, a lot… but paid nonetheless. The OCD sticks.
We were open til midnight. Some guy came in and spent a lot of time by our cassettes. We didn’t take much notice because cassettes were this weird pre-CD holdover without the hipster cred of the vinyl, off in a corner. By the time we went to check on him, we discovered that he had reorganized our cassette section by the color of the spine.
Oh yeah, and Courtney Love came in one time. That was awkward.